It’s fairly common for investigative journalists to be accused of being paid shills, or agents of a foreign power.
Foreign dictators and kleptocrats do it daily.

But becoming the target of a “deep state” conspiracy theory
endorsed by the world’s richest man and supporters of the president of the United States is something else entirely.

That’s what happened to me last week.

It began because of a story, which a colleague and I wrote in collaboration with BuzzFeed News in July 2019.

It shed light on Rudy Giuliani's attempts to dig up negative information on Donald Trump’s political opponents in Ukraine,
where I was based at the time.

The story made a small splash when it was published,
mostly among politicos and Ukraine-watchers, but didn’t get a lot of traction.

That was fine with me.

As an Australian journalist working in Eastern Europe, I was just glad that I had published an interesting story that pushed forward what was known about Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine.

But that September, it was cited in the footnotes of a report by a CIA whistleblower that sparked Trump’s first impeachment. 

This citation is now at the center of absurd claims that we,
as professional reporters,
were part of a “deep state” plot to bring down the president of the United States.

The pretext for this is that,
like scores of independent media outlets around the world,
OCCRP had received grants from USAID,
the United States’ foreign development agency,
which has recently come under the crosshairs of the new Trump administration.

(As with all of our donors, USAID is contractually obligated to stay out of editorial work.) 

One particularly excitable writer, #Michael #Shellenberger,
who identifies himself as a free speech advocate, has gone so far as to label our story
“highly illegal and even treasonous.” 

The irony of it all?

The story started as an investigation into the same target that Giuliani was after:
Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian gas company he worked for, Burisma.

But the thing about objective reporting is that it can lead you to unexpected places.

Here’s how it began. 

It was the middle of 2019,
and I was relatively new to Ukraine,
having moved there to live with my now-wife and work as an OCCRP editor helping local journalists with their investigations.

I asked my Ukrainian colleagues what they thought we should be reporting on. -- They suggested we look into Hunter Biden and Burisma.

There had already been a fair bit of reporting on the younger Biden's questionable relationship with the company.

As an investigative reporter, I wondered if we could find something new to say about the situation. 

I came across a series of articles written for The Hill by #John #Solomon, a conservative journalist, in which he made the explosive allegation that Joe Biden had pressured Ukraine to fire its former chief prosecutor, #Viktor #Shokin,
in order to bury a case against Burisma. 

To check this, I called up some anti-corruption experts in Ukraine who had been part of the effort to go after Burisma.

They were friendly enough, but it was clear they thought I was a bit wet behind the ears.

They explained that I had the story backwards.

Ukrainians, they said, had been out on the streets protesting against Shokin because he was the one protecting Burisma from investigation, not the other way around.

In fact, Biden had called for Shokin’s firing even though Burisma was paying his son.

This didn’t absolve Hunter of wrongdoing — but it showed that, while making a handsome salary, he had failed to deliver the level of insider access Burisma may have hoped for.

My original story idea was dead, though I did ultimately work on another investigation that cast scrutiny on Hunter Biden’s business partner the following year.

(Strangely, our detractors seem to overlook that one.) 

Meanwhile, I had a new mystery to unravel:

how it came to be that a distorted version of the Hunter Biden/Burisma story had gained traction in the United States.

I don’t usually cover the U.S.,
and I felt a little out of my depth.

So my Ukrainian colleagues and I reached out to BuzzFeed News to collaborate.

We scoured the internet and started making calls on both sides of the Atlantic.

The upside-down story being told by Solomon (and Giuliani) had clearly come from the former prosecutor Shokin, and his successor, Yuriy Lutsenko.

We thought the answer might lie with two mysterious Ukraine-linked figures who had grown close to Giuliani,
Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.

Both born in the Soviet Union, the men pursued a colorful life in South Florida.

#Fruman was a businessman with ties back in the Ukrainian city of Odesa to a well-known gangster, known as “The Lightbulb.”

#Parnas was a former stockbroker with a history of unpaid debts.

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https://www.occrp.org/en/feature/investigative-reporting-is-free-speech-not-treason